When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

I waited for each film to become important for me. If I had no ideas for a film, I didn't do a film. So I made not that many films for fifty-four years of working.

If I was tall and blonde, I might have been a dancer or singer.

At that time, when I started, in the '50s, cinema was very classical in its aims.

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It's like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high - you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

I don't watch my own films. There is little time; I'd rather see another film.